The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story

by Craig G. Bartholomew

Lesslie Newbigin puts it this way: “The way we understand human life depends on what conception we have of the human story.

Many people today have abandoned the hope of discovering such a “real story.” They would argue that a true account of the world can’t be found, that individuals and communities must be content with the separate meanings to be discovered in their own more modest and limited stories.

The Christian too believes that there is one true story: the story told in the Bible.

We realize how difficult it is to hear this, in the midst of a society that has tacitly adopted the philosophy of pluralism.

According to the biblical narrative, the meaning of our whole world’s history has been most fully shown to us in the person of Jesus.

The Bible’s claim to tell the true story of our world’s history and meaning is fundamental to its structure.

I can’t understand why you missionaries present the Bible to us in India as a book of religion. It is not a book of religion—and anyway we have plenty of books of religion in India. We don’t need any more! I find in your Bible a unique interpretation of universal history, the history of the whole of creation and the history of the human race. And therefore a unique interpretation of the human person as a responsible actor in history. That is unique. There is nothing else in the whole religious literature of the world to put alongside it.5

Why have Christians who claim to believe the Bible not seen what treasure they have?

In fact, it’s been chopped into fragments that fit into the nooks and crannies of the Western cultural story! When this is allowed to happen, the Bible forfeits its claim to be the one comprehensive, true story of our world and is held captive within another story—the humanist narrative. And thus it will be that other story that will shape our lives.

Australian sociologist John Carroll, who does not profess to be a Christian, believes that the reason that the church in the West is in trouble is because it has forgotten its story.

The Christian churches have comprehensively failed in their one central task—to retell their foundation story in a wa...

God is acting in history for the salvation of the world.

The creation stories of Genesis thus are argumentative. They claim to tell the truth about the world, flatly contradicting other such stories commonplace in the ancient world.

Genesis 1 is an introduction to the Artist.

There is a personal relationship between the divine King and his human subjects.

Unique among the creatures, humankind is personal.

As Augustine observed long ago in his Confessions, we are made for God, and our hearts are restless until we find our rest in him.

Genesis 1 looks at humankind in its relationship to the world. In the process the three great places of the world are brought into existence: earth, sky, and sea.

We are to rule over the creation so that God’s reputation is enhanced within his cosmic kingdom.

To be human means to have huge freedom and responsibility, to respond to God and to be held accountable for that response. Thus, a better way of expressing the concept of humankind’s dominion over creation may be to say that we are God’s royal stewards, put here to develop the hidden potentials in God’s creation so that the whole of it may celebrate his glory.

This calamity comes upon the creation soon after God forms it, threatening to mar the goodness of creation itself and to touch with evil every event coming after it.

In our view, the third chapter of Genesis does tell us reliably about the mysterious origin of evil in God’s world.

Adam and Eve can obey God, or they can defy him. They can yield to God’s law and enjoy life, or they can try to find their own way apart from his instructions and experience death.

We humans are made for relationship, but sin’s effect is to drive us apart.

Above all, humankind is made to enjoy relationship with God, but the sin of Adam and Eve causes them to flee from him and be afraid, ashamed, and alone.

All these actions show that sin has undermined both the sense of self and the sense of belonging to another.

Death means the distortion of relationships in general, and particularly the end of that one vital relationship with God:

Though Adam and Eve flee from him, God graciously takes the initiative to seek them out.

The woman’s offspring will crush the serpent’s head—in other words, God promises to extinguish the evil forces Adam and Eve have unleashed.

God’s provision of clothes for Adam and Eve is a sign to them that he has not given up on his purpose for them.

Disobedience has brought catastrophe.

But our rebellion has deeply affected how we are human.

God graciously tells Cain that if he does what is right, his offering will also be accepted—and then warns him that, if he is not careful, sin will leap on him like a wild animal and possess him.

The good order that God has established for his creation remains.

The justification for art is that God has made the world with the human potential for imaginative, artistic activity.

God’s order for creation has been transgressed in catastrophic ways, which again brings God’s judgment.

The story of the flood reveals a God who is both a holy Judge and a gracious Redeemer.

This covenant is not a relationship between equal partners who hammer out mutually agreeable terms. God is the sovereign Lord, and he alone can establish the terms of the covenant relationship.

Once more, cultural development is ambivalent.

Babel is a monumental, communal attempt by Adam’s race to wrest human autonomy from God once more.

Babel stands as a monument to the perennial human desire to build our own kingdom apart from God.

The trophies that the people of Babel attempted to take for themselves—fame, security, and a heritage for the future—are God’s free gift to Abraham.

Abraham and his descendants are all too human, and as they journey with God they are gradually shaped into people fit to bear the promise.

God promises personal relationship, the growth of a family into a nation, and land.

David Clines helpfully defines the theme of the Pentateuch as “the partial fulfilment—which implies also the partial non-fulfilment—of the promise to or blessing of the patriarchs.

Abraham does demonstrate remarkable faith in God by following his call to leave country and kindred and go to the land that God will show him

Abraham is told that he himself will not see his descendants inherit the promised land (15:15). He has to learn to trust God against all odds, and to his credit, at times he really does (15:6).32 But the stories of Abraham and Sarah reveal how difficult such trust is to achieve.

We should not underestimate how hard it must be at times for Abraham to trust God.

God is pictured as a mighty warrior who has won the battle for his people and will reign forever.

Being God’s people will affect even the way we think about and practice our use of food!